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My game, drifting away (19/12/2017)

Over the course of the last three weeks, I have been working on a rough Alpha version of a grand strategy video game. The game is depicting the geopolitical tensions of the cold war.

Players impersonates the political leaders of USA and USSR. Their objective is to increase the global influence of their country, at the expense of the opponent, while avoiding a nuclear confrontation.

My initial objective was to create a modern version of Chris Craword’s Balance Of Power, a classic game released in 1985. Although I have only seldomly played it, I have been fascinated by that game for many years now. This fascination originates not only from the structure and content of the game itself, but also from the ideas presented by Crawford in the game’s manual and in a book detailing his design choices.

Unfortunately, Balance of Power is not playable on modern platforms. By creating a modern version of this game, I originally intented to adress the following questions : if this game was played today, what could it teach us? Would we find it relevant, fun, useful, accurate, sensible? Could the revival of a half-forgotten classic from the 80′s be a valuable contribution to our contemporary world?

However, after less than a month of work on a basic game engine, I have already started to drift away from the perspective of a mere “modern port” of BoP.